Wednesday, March 4, 2015

kashmir information

Kashmir (Kashmiri: کٔشِیر
/ कॅशीर; Hindi: कश्मीर; Urdu: کشمیر‎; Shina: کشمیر), archaically spelt Cashmere,
is the northwestern region of South Asia.
Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only
the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range. Today, it denotes a
larger area that includes the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir (which consists of Jammu, the Kashmir
Valley, and Ladakh), the
Pakistan-administered autonomous territories of Azad
Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan,
and the Chinese-administered regions of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram
Tract.

In the first
half of the 1st millennium, the Kashmir region became an important centre of Hinduism and later of Buddhism;
later still, in the ninth century, Kashmir Shaivism aroseIn 1349, Shah Mir became the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir, inaugurating the Salatin-i-Kashmir
or Swati dynast For
the next five centuries, Muslim monarchs ruled Kashmir, including the Mughals, who ruled from 1526 until 1751, and the
Afghan Durrani Empire, which ruled from
1747 until 1820. That year, the Sikhs,
under Ranjit Singh, annexed Kashmir. In
1846, after the Sikh defeat in the First Anglo-Sikh
War, and upon the purchase of the region from the British under the Treaty of Amritsar, the Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh, became the new ruler of Kashmir. The
rule of his descendants, under the paramountcy (or tutelage) of the
British Crown, lasted until 1947, when the former
princely state of British India
became a disputed territory, now
administered by three countries: India, Pakistan, and the People's Republic of
China.